Practices of global capital: gaps, cracks and ironies in transnational call centres in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this article I document practices of globalization in a newly emerging transnational labour force – call centre workers in New Delhi, India, who provide voice‐to‐voice service to clients dialling toll‐free numbers in North America. Recent theorists have focused on how capitalism is continually under construction, and how heterogeneous groups of workers play active roles in relation to transnational corporate processes. Accordingly, I trace three practices that constitute transnational call centre work –scripting, synchronicity and locational masking – and examine how Indian workers negotiate these practices. I argue that the transnationalization of voice‐to‐voice service work provides the opportunity for Indian workers to construct ‘Americans’ and situate their own jobs within global labour markets. Drawing on interviews with call centre workers, managers and trainers in India, I explore the ways in which analyses of the practices of globalization provides an insight on workers' attempts to enhance their quality of life vis‐à‐vis transnational capitalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".